Signing at McKay Used Books Saturday July 1

Howdy all you readers out there! To help support my latest novel, The End of Daze, I’ll be selling that book, all the Fat White Vampire series books, and the whole lineup from MonstraCity Press between 11 AM and 3 PM tomorrow, Saturday, July 1 at Richard McKay Used Books in Manassas (8345 Sudley Rd, Manassas, VA 20109-3508; 703 361 9042). I’ll be right outside the store’s front entrance, sitting at a table in front of my brand-new MonstraCity Press banner (very handsome, if I do say so myself!). Four hours is a long time to sit staring at the parking lot and hoping someone will get over their shyness and not race by me to get inside the shop, so please drop by if you’re in the area and come say hello! I love meeting friends old, new, and newly discovered.

Also, McKay Used Books is simply an awesome place to browse for incredibly cheap science fiction, fantasy, and horror paperbacks, reasonably priced used graphic novels, manga, and comics, and a huge variety of used music, dvds, and vintage pop culture toys. It’s one of my favorite spots to hang out for an hour or two. So kill two birds with one stone — scratch that browsing itch, and come keep me company!

Andrew Fox New Orleans Signings

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Andrew Fox Signing The End of Daze at Winchester Book Gallery

Looking for a fun outing this Sunday, May 21st? If you live in the Washington, DC metro area or Northern Virginia, why not come out to historic Winchester, Virginia in the spectacular Shenandoah Valley and visit me at the Winchester Book Gallery between noon and 2 PM?

The Book Gallery is located on Winchester’s famed Loudoun Street Pedestrian Mall located in the heart of Old Town Winchester, a 45-block National Register Historic District, surrounded by dining, boutique shopping, and historical museums. 7 N. Loudoun Street, Winchester, VA 22601 – Tel. 540.667.3444 – info@winchesterbookgallery.com

The End of Daze is a satirical Jewish version of the Left Behind series that answers the question, “What if the end days arrive and the traditional Jewish version is the accurate one?” As you may imagine, chaos ensues, with the other, much larger world faiths being very unhappy, particularly those followers of Islam — and the progressive elements of the Jewish community are among the biggest critics of G-d’s reemergence onto the scene.

Copies are available for $14.95, and of course I’ll be more than happy to sign them and personalize them. Stick around and I’ll join you for a cup of coffee after the signing!

Here’s the back cover copy:

“Jacob Zvi has turned his back on everything he was taught to value. His faith, his family, his citizenship, and even his morals. Yet seemingly divine fate introduces Jacob to the struggling members of an Orthodox congregation in the middle of a ghetto in New Orleans while terrorists explode a purloined Soviet nuclear artillery shell atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

“But things quickly take a turn for the Biblical, for the worthy dead are returning to life to build a Third Temple atop the now radioactive Temple Mount, scoured empty by the atomic blast. They return not to bodies of flesh and blood, but to cybernetic bodies produced in an advanced robotics lab on the Tulane campus, part of a secret project funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

“The End of Days has begun, but unlike anything that has been anticipated by Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim. When Jacob is inexplicably selected to serve as God’s mouthpiece, and he finds he makes for a clownishly awkward prophet of God’s Kingdom on Earth.

“But he will have to up his game immeasurably in order to broker peace with all the factions who bitterly reject this version of the End Times—chief among them progressive Jews themselves! THE END OF DAZE is a science fiction eschatological satire fitting for the End Times encroaching on the twenty-first century.”

To Substack or Not to Substack? (That is the question)

Hello, dear readers and friends. I’d like to ask for some feedback.

I’m strongly considering setting up a Substack subscription newsletter to provide serialized novels. Those of you who are familiar with the history of popular fiction know that back in the nineteenth century, novelists such as Charles Dickens published their works chapter by chapter in newspapers, offering readers a weekly dose of their latest novel. Later, after serialization was done, the work got published as a stand-alone volume. This mode of publication not only made novels accessible and affordable to a far broader audience than would have purchased bound folio copies from bookstores or news merchants, it also added an additional element of anticipation and excitement to the reading experience as readers eagerly awaited the day the next installment would appear. I suppose the closest analogue for modern media consumers is the experience of waiting for the next episode of one’s favorite Netflix or Disney Plus streaming series to drop (i.e.: The Last of Us in my household).

I’ve recently been reminded yet again of the hostility and disdain much of the traditional publishing industry holds for that category of writers who were once referred to as mid-list authors (the great majority of published writers, whose books either just break even or lose money and are subsidized by a tiny population of bestsellers). All of the large publishing houses and most of the smaller ones have made themselves into closed shops — they will not deign to look at queries or submissions from writers who do not retain an agent to act as their go-between. In essence, publishing houses have out-sourced their sludge pile reading function to non-employees; by edict, they have roped in the (for publishing houses) unpaid labor of agents to do the work of first-line refusal/acceptance. New writers who are unable to attract the interest of an agent and veteran writers who have, for whatever reason, been dropped by their agent and are unable to find another are locked out of at least 90% of potential traditional publishing slots. Older, established agents have established client lists that take up their time and attention; most agents who are actively seeking new clients are the inexperienced and young sort, and they are not interested in taking on clients of my type — older, paler, maler, and cis-er.

The last of my novels to be published by even a third-tier conventional publisher came out in 2009. I never stopped writing, though. Since that book appeared, I’ve written 18 more novels and two long novellas. I’ve put out a handful of them through my personal imprint, MonstraCity Press, achieving modest sales at best. I also managed to get one novel published by a micro-press that does not have any distribution advantages over my own little MonstraCity Press, although they did grant me a nice cover and a thorough editing job, benefits not inconsiderable. Throughout most of the time since my first novel, Fat White Vampire Blues, came out from Del Rey Books in 2003, I was client to one agent or another, the last for about ten years. He gave me a mostly decent effort, although he refused to market some of my work, and in the end he was only able to acquire one publishing contract for me, for a non-fiction book from a small university press. Not long after, he dropped me as a client. For the past two plus years, I’ve sought to market my unsold novels myself to smaller publishing firms that are willing to consider unagented manuscripts. A few of these small firms have been very diligent about getting back to me. Some say up front that they will only correspond regarding projects they are interested in. Many don’t say this up front but never respond in any fashion to queries or follow-ups, a sour, frustrating experience.

The obvious response to a situation of this sort would be to pick up my ball and go home. Why bother with all that tsuris? But I am one of those people who is afflicted by a need to write. I cannot imagine going even a month without working on a novel, and I find myself growing notably grouchy if I allow a week to pass without working on something. The psychological, emotional, and physiological benefits I accrue from successful writing sessions where the flow is flowing and I am fully engaged are comparable to the endorphin-releasing outcomes of other people’s meditation or aerobic exercise sessions. But the result is that I end up with between two and three fresh novels each year, and no audience. I am a believer in the notion that writing of any sort, but particularly fiction, requires both a sender and a receiver in order to be complete; the reader completes the work of creation with his or her visualizations and the personal memories and insights she or he brings to the reading experience.

I could put out all of my unpublished work through MonstraCity Press. But I’ve been caught for years in an indecision loop, trying to decide for each individual novel whether I should go for the few dozen to couple of hundred readers the book will accrue through MonstraCity Press publication versus a potentially much larger readership it might attract if I were to succeed in placing it with a conventional publishing house. Just when I think I’m resigned to going with the MonstraCity Press option, a new glimmer of hope for my being traditionally published flares up for a time. Then dies. The repetition of this cycle over nearly fifteen years has become a form of torture.

Thus… the possible option of serial publication of my books through Substack, a new mode of content delivery. But not one appropriate for many writers of long-form fiction, due to the medium’s de facto requirement for a minimum of weekly installments from its writers.

I recently took a business school class that focused on the concept of comparative advantage. Lesson: don’t get involved in a business venture unless you bring some unique or rare advantage to the table that can’t easily be replicated by your competitors.

Weeelllll, it just so happens that when it comes to weekly or twice-weekly provision of chapters of a novel, I happen to possess two big competitive advantages. A) I have 13 unpublished, unread-by-anyone-but- my-wife novels sitting on my laptop’s hard drive, all set to go, many of them first books in planned series. B) I set myself a target of a thousand words a day, five days a week, and I generally exceed it, so even when I’d eventually run low of older material to serialize, I could probably keep up a serialized publication pace of a couple of chapters each week.

And serialized publication through Substack won’t hinder later publication of my books, likely revised, as paperbacks and ebooks through MonstraCity Press. Substack will simply make available to readers an earlier and alternative format of my novels, with extra anticipation and more chances to engage with the author added for those who subscribe.

Should I decide to take the plunge, I figure I would begin with free serialized publication of a novel that came out from MonstraCity Press a decade ago, Fire on Iron, my Civil War-set dark fantasy adventure novel about ironclad gunboats on the Yazoo River in Mississippi and how both Union and Confederate sailors get embroiled in the plot of a slave who was a village hogun in Africa to conjure a race of African fire demons to lay the whup-ass on all his tormentors. I’d start with this one because I have two more novels in the series written that I never got around to putting out through MonstraCity Press; those novels I would serialize behind a paywall for paid subscribers. I anticipate I’d charge $4 per month subscription for two chapters each week, probably dropping Mondays and Thursdays. When I would finish one novel, I’d roll into another, probably with some free stories or free sample chapters in between. The novels subscribers would be offered would include offbeat science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery-suspense, near-future road noir (my own little invented subgenre), and some cross-genre projects. Readers would see more Fat White Vampire novels, the continuation of the August Micholson Chronicles begun with Fire on Iron, my Island Risen epic fantasy trilogy, a road noir series beginning with Retaliation Road, espionage-suspense novels featuring science fiction writers as protagonists (first book titled Red TAROT 7), and a series that is turning out to be loads of fun — just now completing the first one — starring King Ahab, Bad Boy of the Bible, bouncing from time period to time period, forced to oppose, as penance for his many sins, a multitude of anti-Semitic plots conjured up by the ghosts of ancient giants, the Nephilim, wicked offspring of rebellious angels and lusty human women, all drowned in Noah’s flood and craving vengeance ever since. Oh, and I’ve got a trilogy of middle-grade horror-adventure books, too.

So, my dear friends and readers, my question to you (finally getting ’round to it here) is: do you have any interest at all in reading serialized novels of the sort I write? Would you find it fun and exciting to have a new chapter of a novel to look forward to every Monday and Thursday?

Don’t worry, I’m not asking for a commitment here. All I want is feedback in the form of a brief comment. That’s not to say that if you post “Goody! Goody! Can’t wait!” in the comments, I won’t shoot you an email at some point asking you to subscribe (I mean, come on, you’d expect me to, wouldn’t you?). But right now I’d really just appreciate some sense of whether a market for serialized novels of my sort exists. Doesn’t have to be a big one… I’m already acclimated to a small audience, and monthly pizza money is still money. I just want to get a sense that I won’t be publishing to a yawning void before diving into the Substack lagoon.

The End of Daze from 12 Years Back

Since I’m finally getting around to updating my website after a (gulp!) two-year hiatus and doing a bit of publicity for my latest book, The End of Daze, I thought I’d share with you a post regarding this novel that I posted way back in September 2011 when I was first writing the book. So here it is, The End of Daze as it looked to me back in the antediluvian age of the early ‘aughts, during the “golden age” of this blog when I tried to post 3-4 times per week…


God is back.
He’s not happy.
And He’s ready to go all Old Testament about it.

How flawed can a man be and still be chosen to serve as God’s messenger? Young Jacob Zvi, 26, a doctoral student in Cultural Studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, is about to find out. Jacob has turned his back on everything he was taught to value. He has abandoned Orthodox Judaism, his citizenship in Israel (where he and his parents made aliyah when Jacob was in high school), his responsibilities as a son, and even his own admittedly low standards of morality and loyalty. Yet a quick and powerful friendship with an elderly Jewish widower, an introduction to an Orthodox congregation barely hanging on in the middle of a black ghetto, and the explosion of a nuclear artillery shell on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem conspire to force Jacob to completely reevaluate the cynical, self-serving turn his life has taken.

For the worthy dead are returning to life. Not to bodies of flesh and blood, but to far superior, cybernetic bodies, produced in an advanced robotics lab on the Tulane campus, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. One of the lead cybernetics researchers, Wyonna Shaver, recently married Jacob’s rabbi, Helvetica Rhinegold, in a same-sex civil ceremony in Boston. Rabbi Helvetica, a controversial theologian of the ultra-liberal Reconstructionist-Renewalist denomination, and the daughter of violent 1960s radicals, believes God is a mental construct which Jews teach themselves to believe in, in order to maximize their potential as a community. She is horrified to learn her wife the scientist believes her innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence have facilitated the rise of the dead and the return of the Old Testament God to Earth.

Helvetica is even more affronted to discover that Jacob, her favored congregant and protégé, has inexplicably been selected to serve as God’s mouthpiece. God has resurrected an abandoned, hurricane-damaged synagogue in the Central City ghetto of New Orleans to serve as His temporary abode while the robotic resurrectants build a Third Temple atop the nuclear bomb devastated Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In a dizzying series of events, Jacob finds himself serving as both high priest in the temporary sanctuary and press secretary for God, the Creator’s liaison to the heads of all of Earth’s religious communities.

Will the world’s great religions launch themselves at each other’s throats? Will the Middle East explode in the War of Armageddon? Will the people of Earth learn to accept that only one particular set of prophesies of the End of Days will come true  those promulgated by the tiniest of the world’s monotheistic religions? Will Jacob be able to carry out his mission of reconciliation? Or will Rabbi Helvetica Rhinegold succeed in carrying out her parents’ apocalyptic desires and fomenting a worldwide revolution against God?

Novels and books such as the Left Behind series and The Late, Great Planet Earth have dramatized the Evangelical Christian vision of the End Times. Now The End of Daze does the same for the Jewish version, but with a propitious dose of political and social satire perfect for our unsettled times.

Super Review for The Devil’s Toy Box

Reviews are hard to come by, especially good reviews, and particularly any reviews at all for books out from small presses. Given this unfortunate reality, made worse by the deaths of the great majority of newspaper book review sections and columns and the cancelation of magazines such as Book Forum, I’m especially pleased to share a terrific, very detailed review of my nonfiction book The Devil’s Toy Box: Exposing and Defusing Promethean Terrorists. The review appeared in the December 2022 issue of The Journal of Homeland Security Affairs and was written by Ted Lewis, a computer industry pioneer and one of my former professors at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

Here’s an excerpt for those of you who don’t want to click over to the full review:

“Sometimes using real exploits with real people and other times using made-up scenarios, Fox brings the reader inside the heads of the bad guys. Over half of the book is synthetic – made-up stories used to teach by allegory. It can be disturbing because it is so real.” …

“Fox dives into the mental states of the terrorists who bring calamity down on unsuspecting people, so the reader gets a visceral feeling in addition to the facts. It is a mechanism that works well in homeland security because there are plenty examples in real life as well as opportunity for imagining what might happen. And this is his ultimate goal – to get the student-reader to think out of the Devil’s box and prevent or avoid the known unknowns.

“His stories can get bloody and horrific as they should, because it is real life. I especially enjoyed reading about the black hat who hacked into a patient’s computer controlled prosthetic because I wear a pacemaker. Pacemakers are notoriously easy to hack into. The criminal can simply command it to stop pacing or run wild, pumping too much blood until you die . In another semi-realistic episode, he dramatizes the take-over of a truck, by a hacker intending to do harm. Once under the control of a malicious hacker, cars and trucks can be used as weapons.” …

“I recommend this book for the lay reader who wants to see what it is like to be a terrorist and how homeland security practitioners approach the terrorist problem. It makes entertaining reading for the non-expert, non-homeland security practitioner as well. I can’t wait for the movie.”

You and me both, Ted!

Anticipating Tomorrow’s Terrorists

My first book of nonfiction, The Devil’s Toy Box: Exposing and Defusing Promethean Terrorists, is out from Potomac Books, an imprint of University of Nebraska Press. It features a chapter on the unique suitability of science fiction writers to be part of a Promethean Spyglass forecasting team and also contains five detailed terror scenarios (essentially horrific short stories from the perpetrators’ view). Here’s a description from the publisher:

“A Promethean technology is one that allows someone of average resources, skills, and intelligence to carry out actions that were once only doable by governments, militaries, or institutions with considerable resources. Essentially, Promethean technologies allow users to create their own weapons of mass destruction.

“These emerging technologies are increasingly affordable and accessible—and are no more complicated to operate than a satellite TV control box or a smart phone. Although these technologies are a terrifying prospect, the more we know about these dangers, the better we can prepare to head them off.

“In The Devil’s Toy Box, Andrew Fox lays out seven decades of preemptive analysis and shows that while homeland security has explored, in depth, the possible Promethean threats the world faces, it has failed to forecast the most likely attacks. Using fictional scenarios Fox teaches how to predict future threats and how to forecast which ones are likely to be used by bad actors within the next five to ten years. Combining the skills of homeland security experts and the imaginations of speculative fiction writers, he then offers an analytical method to deter, counter, or abate these threats, rather than adopting an attitude of resigned fatalism.”

The publisher has made it available in hardcover and as an ebook; unfortunately, they chose to price the physical hardback and the ebook the same, which doesn’t make much sense to me (I complained but to no avail), and which has resulted in — surprise, surprise! — approximately ZERO copies of the ebook being sold. Dare you be the first to buy the ebook version for (gasp) $26.49? (Okay, Amazon took some pity on their Kindle customers and lowered the price from an even more unreasonable $32.95.) Or will you fork out $29.37 for the handsome and durable hardcover?

Buy Kindle version from Amazon

Buy hardback copy from Amazon

The End of Daze Now Available!

It’s only been a wait of a dozen years, but one of my personal favorites of my books, The End of Daze, has just been published in paperback and ebook formats by Madness Heart Press. Finally! It came out under their imprint Aggadah Try It, which is a specialty imprint focused on science fiction, fantasy, and horror of Jewish interest.

In essence, my novel is a satirical Jewish version of the Left Behind series that answers the question, “What if the End of Days arrives and the traditional Jewish version is the accurate one?” As you may imagine, chaos ensues, with the other, much larger world faiths being very unhappy, particularly those followers of Islam — and the progressive elements of the Jewish community are among the biggest critics of G-d’s reemergence onto the scene.

Here’s the back cover copy:

“Jacob Zvi has turned his back on everything he was taught to value. His faith, his family, his citizenship, and even his morals. Yet seemingly divine fate introduces Jacob to the struggling members of an Orthodox congregation in the middle of a ghetto in New Orleans while terrorists explode a purloined Soviet nuclear artillery shell atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

“But things quickly take a turn for the Biblical, for the worthy dead are returning to life to build a Third Temple atop the now radioactive Temple Mount, scoured empty by the atomic blast. They return not to bodies of flesh and blood, but to cybernetic bodies produced in an advanced robotics lab on the Tulane campus, part of a secret project funded by the Department of Homeland Security.

“The End of Days has begun, but unlike anything that has been anticipated by Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim. When Jacob is inexplicably selected to serve as God’s mouthpiece, and he finds he makes for a clownishly awkward prophet of God’s Kingdom on Earth.

“But he will have to up his game immeasurably in order to broker peace with all the factions who bitterly reject this version of the End Times—chief among them progressive Jews themselves! THE END OF DAZE is a science fiction eschatological satire fitting for the End Times encroaching on the twenty-first century.”

You can purchase a paperback copy for $14.95 or an ebook for $4.99 from Amazon:

Buy Kindle ebook from Amazon

Buy paperback from Amazon

And here is the full wraparound cover for the paperback:

Cover Revealed for HUNT THE FAT WHITE VAMPIRE

The fourth book in the popular Fat White Vampire series, Hunt the Fat White Vampire, will be published by MonstraCity Press in both ebook and print formats on June 14, 2021, right on the heels of the first-ever paperback publication of the third book in the series, Fat White Vampire Otaku, on April 12, 2021. Here’s the newly designed cover for Hunt.

Paperback of HAZARDOUS IMAGININGS Now on Sale!

In addition to ebook versions available through Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords store, Apple iTunes, Scribd, and Odilo, all priced at $4.99 (Barnes and Noble Nook available soon), the trade paperback of Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction is now on sale for $16.95 — a nice, thick book! (If I do say so, myself.)

Guest Editorial in Hollywood in Toto

Here’s a guest opinion piece I just published on Hollywood in Toto, an entertainment news and commentary website, “Rescuing Science Fiction from the Horde of ‘Woke Zombies’: Why Hazardous Imaginings Wrests Sci-fi Back from the Cancel Culture Mob”. Have a look!

99-Cent Kindle Short “Watson Has Killed Me, Alas”

In order to help celebrate the upcoming publication of my big novella and story collection, Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, I’ve put out a hugely entertaining Sherlock Holmes zombie mystery story, “Watson Has Killed Me, Alas”, as a 99-cent Kindle short.

Famed detective Sherlock Holmes undertakes a life-and-death mission in the British Raj, responding to reports of a “ghϋl plague” that turns its victims into zombies who crave living flesh. Loyal Watson arrives in India first, where a malignant Chinese mastermind arranges for his zombification. An unsuspecting Holmes falls victim next. Then it is up to the indomitable Holmes, in a race against time, to locate the villain and a possible antidote. But can a weakening Sherlock Holmes, losing more of his intellect every day, hope to prevail against Dr. Lòng Huòshèng, known as the Victorious Dragon — the shadowy villain who may be the infamous Dr. Fu Manchu?

99-Cent Kindle Short “The Man Who Would Be Kong”

In order to help celebrate the pending publication of Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, I’ve put out one of my favorite short stories as a 99-cent Kindle short, “The Man Who Would Be Kong”.

An elderly man, Max Strauss, retired in Miami Beach, visits an entrepreneur who is about to open a King Kong-themed restaurant. Max claims to have portrayed the giant gorilla in the 1933 classic film. But everyone knows that King Kong was actually an 18″ tall animated model, don’t they? So is Max an attention-seeking fraud? Or is he something far greater?

Hazardous Imaginings Now Available for Pre-Order

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Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction is now available for pre-order at Amazon for the low, low price of only $4.99 in Kindle format! Publication date is Monday, October 12, 2020. Order your copy today! The book will also be available in trade paperback, Nook, Kobo, and other popular e-formats.

This volume includes two short novels and five short stories, all of which push the boundaries of taboo in science fiction. An English archeologist who yearns for the love of a young Jewish refuge sets out to convince a majority of the world’s population that the Holocaust never happened — hoping to not only wipe it from the annals of history, but also from reality. The Martian colony Bradbury sends an investigator to pursue a gay Uyghur murderer in a future Australian city where members of each ethnic and grievance group are invisible to all those who don’t belong to their tribe. A far-future academic treatise describes a rediscovered Fusionist liturgical text that combines the writings of radical feminist Joanna Russ and female slavery fantasist John Norman. An aggressively therapeutic State of Florida lovingly wraps its bureaucratic tentacles around those it deems unenlightened. A born-again Christian cafeteria worker in a small Texas college town becomes the only friend of an insectoid alien come to evacuate humanity from a doomed Earth. These stories leave no sacred cows unprodded.

HAZARDOUS IMAGININGS & AGAIN, HAZARDOUS IMAGININGS On the Way

Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, a collection of two novellas and three stories of mine, is scheduled for publication on 10/12/2020. Its companion volume, Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, an international anthology featuring 14 stories, is scheduled for publication on 12/14/2020.

Both books will be available as ebooks and trade paperbacks. I’ll share information on pricing and contributors soon.

Here’s a link to an article from the Hollywood in Toto site that gives some background on the genesis of these books.